Third Person

"Third Person" is Paul Haggis' best movie, and the one he has been building toward for years. Like "Crash," it involves multiple characters, but its scope is wider. It takes place in several countries and doesn't depend on a single issue to make it whole. Instead, its characters are united through a shared emotional state, a sense of dislocation, of longing, of feeling lost and needing connection.

This approach is truer and more poetic than connecting characters through a social issue, as in "Crash," which dealt with race relations, or Alejandro Inarritu's "Babel," which dealt with communication between cultures. It's truer because the inspiration for this kind of narrative usually has nothing to do with politics, but with feelings - a desire to transcend the confines of a single consciousness and hold in your hand the glories and sufferings of humanity.

So this is a big attempt. Haggis is not writing a sonnet, but an epic; not a nocturne, but a symphony. And the whole time, from first note to last, he risks falling on his face, because there's nothing really holding "Third Person" together but an emotion that he's nurturing. But he uses that. He finds elliptical links between scenes. He accelerates the cutting, so there's a gradual sense of build. He follows the river of emotion and, unlike so many who've run aground, he actually gets to where he's going - and takes us with him.

One practical key to a successful movie with multiple narratives is to make sure all the stories are of equal interest. (All cylinders must be firing, or else you end up with something like "Cloud Atlas," in which half the theater goes for a bathroom break every time Halle Berry and Tom Hanks are in the future.) In "Third Person," Haggis introduces three sets of people all reaching a state of crisis.

The primary story, the first among equals, involves a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (Liam Neeson), working out of a suite in Paris, trying to finish a novel and wrestling with the real possibility that he's washed up. He has left his wife, and when his young lover (Olivia Wilde) arrives, the dynamic between them is peculiar. There's real affection, attraction and need; and yet neither trusts the other. He plays games and does everything he can to keep her off balance, until we realize what he already knows - that this is the only way to hold her attention.

Meanwhile, in Rome, a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) walks into a bar, meets one of the most attractive women in the city (Moran Atias) and gets drawn into a dangerous situation involving ransoms and white slave traders. The Rome and Paris stories are different, but the characters' emotions are similar: Intense physical attraction, desperate need, and two people who have no reason to trust each other.

Somewhat outside the pattern is the New York story: Mila Kunis plays a former actress whose career has tanked. She is frantic to regain visitation rights to see her son, but she keeps sabotaging herself; and her estranged husband - a world-famous painter (James Franco) - won't give her an inch. Kunis plays a flailing wreck and commits to it. There's no attempt to beguile the audience.

The movie inter-cuts from one narrative to another, but never too soon or too early, so that there is a sense of flow between scenes. At times it's a little confusing keeping track of the cities. Some of the New York and Paris scenes were filmed in Rome, and they look it, but this is a minor point. In any case, some of the confusion over location is intentional, and in the end, it all makes sense.

The main thing is that Haggis has really accomplished something here. First, he has given his actors something to play. Though I can watch Liam Neeson showing off his "set of skills" as an action star any day of the week, it's good to be reminded now and again that he's a serious actor. Olivia Wilde, who showed her depth in "Drinking Buddies," increases her stature here. And there's no doubting that this is Adrien Brody's best showcase in years, one that capitalizes on his particular variety of wounded brashness.

Beyond that, Haggis has taken an expansive, vague and yet intense emotion, and, while staying true to it, has transformed it, making it hang together as a narrative - something close to impossible to do. In that way, "Third Person" extends the reach of cinema.